Tolerance cannot be measured in terms of degrees of intolerance. I am essentially opposed to burning books even when they incite others to violence. But freedom is either an absolute or it is conditioned on not inciting others to violence. Anything else is rationalized bigotry.

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Thursday, November 27, 2014

Arab Xenophobia and Global Religious Conflict

After the murder of four rabbis
in a Jerusalem
synagogue the news soon spread.In Judea
and Samaria and in Gaza, thousands of Arabs celebrated the
bloody slaughter.They handed out sweetmeats.When Baruch Goldstein killed Arab worshipers, in an address to the Knesset, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin
denounced Goldstein. Rabin, addressing not just Goldstein and his legacy but
also other settlers he regarded as militant, declared:

You are not part of the community of Israel... You
are not part of the national democratic camp which we all belong to in this
house, and many of the people despise you. You are not partners in the Zionist
enterprise. You are a foreign implant. You are an errant weed. Sensible Judaism
spits you out. You placed yourself outside the wall of Jewish law... We say to
this horrible man and those like him: you are a shame on Zionism and an
embarrassment to Judaism.

That ethical difference between
the two separate nations is what drives antisemitism in the West today.

Xenophobia is defined as an
unreasonable fear or hatred of foreigners or strangers – but I would object to
the word ‘unreasonable’.To fear that
which is unfamiliar or different to one-self is understandable but not
reasonable. It is something easily over-come if both sides are willing to work
at it and again, if both sides have the desire to accept the other.It is the latter part of this particular
social paradigm that is most acutely felt to be missing from the immigrant
experience in the contemporary western world.

Many Muslims do not want to
integrate into Western Society and they take this ambivalent immigration
experience in a wholly surprising direction when they turn that expectation on
its head and demand we integrate their cultural values into our homes, our
workplaces and our public places.Before
I am attacked for being selectively biased, there are ultra-orthodox Jews who
are the same but they are overwhelmingly, a minority, even amongst Jews.And there is, even then, usually one
difference. Judaism created a template for people to live together, without
fear of one another.As a behavioral
principle, ‘derekh eretz’ stands out in rabbinic literature as a guide for
human relations.It is typically
defined as doing what is right but the important condition here is that each
society has its own definition of decency; it is incumbent upon the Jewish
community to reconcile its ethics to those of the dominant cultural
community.Not then the same concept as
practiced by our Muslim friends.

We seem to have forgotten that
society is evolutionary and that justice, for nearly all of human history, has
taken second place to the whims of those who wielded power. A surprising
failure of modern scholarship is the inability of thinkers to even attempt to
understand the circumstances of peoples’ lives in other times in comparison
with how we all live today.One of the
working principles of archaeology is to try to understand the past by reference
to what we know in the present.We seem
to have missed the point that the present is similarly informed by the past.

These meandering thoughts came to
mind as I read the Israeli and foreign press during the past couple of weeks.
Terrible things had been happening. The bloody slaughter of four rabbis as they
prayed in a Jerusalem synagogue (and the Druze policeman who came to their aid);
a three month old baby murdered by a pious Palestinian, there were two things
that all acts of terror and not just these two examples shared.The first was the hedging of condemnation by
the worlds’ journalists and politicians.The second was the reflexive apologia for Islam that absolved its
adherents of any individual guilt.This
collectively racist approach is damaging our society as it excuses theirs for
the evil that they now commit at every possible opportunity.

We are living through a period of
contradictions and uncertainty. Prosperity has made us less dependent on faith
for our emotional well-being.Our
physical insecurity may be minor but we are constantly exposed to news about
terrifying plagues, gratuitous acts of violence and wars, brought into our
living rooms and interpreted for our entertainment, by the global media.It is unsettling so we retreat behind simple
explanations and a consumer lifestyle that pushes all that bad news away.

The West has lost its purpose.
Its obsessive focus on the State of Israel is partly demographic (Muslim
immigration), but in part it is an indictment of the complexity with which we
are unable to cope.How else to explain
the racism that forgives every atrocity carried out in the name of Allah, the
passionate debate on the Left that pardons every hate crime as a product of
Zionism?

The Left and its Muslim allies
have discarded truth as an inconvenience that prevents them from living a life
that to any normal person living in a normal environment is wholly illegitimate
for its love of violence and worship of hate. We forgive our academics and
their students, the street activists and their Muslim allies for the lies that
they use to validate their behavior.They have redefined normative behavior as deception and dishonor.In our society today dishonesty is no longer
viewed as a sin. The truth becomes a lie and the lie an unalterable truth.“Hitler called his propaganda theory ‘The Big
Lie’. It was easy enough, he explained, just make the lie big, make it simple,
keep saying it, and eventually the world will believe it.” (Mark Langfan)

An example follows:For most pro-Palestinian activists Jerusalem
was always Muslim, Islam came before Judaism (we were always usurpers), and
Islam has always treated us well, it has never deprived us of our religious
rights to pray at our holy sites and by the way, the Temple Mount was never a
Jewish site of prayer or holiness. Similarly, Jews may or may not have lived in
Israel; their historical
narrative may have been located elsewhere but in any case the Holy Land is an
Islamic endowment just as Spain
is.Jews have left the stage of history
and have no right to return to it.

So here is one problem.We are again being fed propaganda that we appear
to be unable to combat.If we leave the
information war to our enemies it is interpreted as validating their
narrative.We arrived here because our
secular societies dismissed with arrogant delusion the multiple threats that
abandoning philosophy to the extremists posed to our way of life. Much of
what afflicts our society today results from the triumph of science over
faith. I will explain:

The degree to which humanity is
capable of exercising free will has been a matter of speculation by
philosophers as well as scientists. If we are all the product of divine providence
then we have no free will; if all that matters is the physical world then free
will does not exist and we are all of us subject to the whims of scientific
forces that can be explained diagrammatically.If science can determine that the physical universe is governed by
mechanistic causation then our own actions become deterministic.This theory absolves us of personal
responsibility for the choices we make.

Human beings have created an
ethical framework for living that regulates our universe to the degree that we
can control our spiritual environment even if we are unable to control our
physical environment.We do not entirely
have free will if our minds are hard wired to fire and occasionally misfire.The brain is not a perfect organ. No matter
where we are born we all conquer complex concepts of language and we all reach
certain milestones in our intellectual development at similar stages of our
early life.

So we do not have free will to the
extent that we are all products of our physical, biological limitations but we
do have choice.Even those choices are not
limitless.Our bodies limit us, our Laws
constrain us.Our ethical system reminds
us that though we are able to lead a materialistic life of drunken debauchery
and endless narcissism there are alternative choices to be considered. A
religious life is not for everyone. A secular humanist can equally lead a moral
life if the parameters are set and the questions are asked.

The importance of choice is
paramount to our survival.If all we
live for is what we can easily attain then our purpose is shallow and with
little difficulty, we are led. That is not freedom but voluntary submission.
Perhaps that is why Islam (which means submission) is so attractive to so many
people. It is a form of slavery that encourages its adherents to enslave
others, for their sake.Freedom then,
is an act of will, a constant companion to the right to choose.The problem is that we are constantly fighting
against people and forces that do not believe that we have choices.This excuses their benighted ethics because
it is something that is outside of their control.

The religious psychopath who cuts
off heads or tortures his victims till they beg for death, the axe murderer and
the baby killer are all forgiven because they have no choice.But there are always choices and it is how we
choose to fight for our rights or wrongs that determine our outlook towards
others, towards society and towards the human project.

I chose the title “Arab
Xenophobia” because, to return to the fourth paragraph, it is a choice that has
defined and continues to define the Arab Nation.A few statements from our
enemies will illustrate the point.

“We must massacre the Jews in
order to break them.” Yunis al- Astal (member of PLC) March 6, 2014

“Anyone who has a knife, a
weapon or a car, and is not attacking a settler or a Jew, and is not killing
tens of Zionists, does not belong to Palestine.”
Fawzi Barhoum (Hamas Spokesperson) July 30, 2014

“Blessed be your quality
weapons, the wheels of your cars, your axes and kitchen knives because [they
are being used] according to Allah’s will. We are the soldiers of Allah.”
Sultan Abu Al-Einein (senior adviser to Mahmoud Abbas and member of the Fatah
Central Committee) Tuesday 18th November 2014 in praise of the two murderers
who carried out the synagogue massacre